The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865-1881

Reconstruction history--and that of the scalawag--lives in the shadow
of the Civil War. Apparently, no end is in sight to the celebrations and
commemorations of that romantic wartime era. But a nation that lavishly
celebrated a Civil War centennial and a Revolutionary War bicentennial,
that sat glued to the television screen to watch such productions as "The
Blue and the Gray" and "North and South" several years ago and recently
"The Civil War" and "The Divided Union," ignored the anniversary of
the Reconstruction era of American history. North or South, there was no
centennial for Reconstruction.

If scalawags had endured a bad press before 1977 when this book first
appeared, their reputation fifteen years later is improved among scholars
but hardly better among the general public. Scalawags are associated
with the oppressor in an era when the South emerged from its shattered
dreams of independence to find itself occupied by a conquering army--
an experience unique to the South in American history. Their physical
world in ruins around them and their regional psyche thoroughly battered,
Southerners retained only their pride in a glorious and prosperous past.
Anyone who collaborated with the oppressors was identified as a disgraced
traitor who deserved ostracism. The reputations of nineteenth-century
Republicans and the Reconstruction era probably will never be entirely
rehabilitated, despite the fashionable chic that surrounds Alabama Republicans in the twentieth century. Few Southerners willingly acknowledge an ancestor who was a Republican during Reconstruction.

Much of this contempt stems from the belief that Alabama and the
South were treated unfairly after the Civil War. Viewed in the world
context of the aftermath of civil wars--summary executions of defeated
leaders, confiscation and redistribution of the property of the defeated
people, massive eviction and resettlement elsewhere--the clemency of
the Federal government after the Civil War is noteworthy. Southerners
who complain about the harshness of Republican Reconstruction refuse
to admit what they do not wish to see: that the South lost a civil war that
had grown increasingly unpopular with its contemporaries.

If what was not done affects our appreciation of the stigma attached to
Reconstruction, what did occur also needs to be placed in perspective.

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